22" LCD Monitors Roundup. Part III. Page 5

Today we are going to talk about five LCD monitors with 22-inch diagonal. All of these monitors have one similarity: they are all built with 5ms TN matrices. This roundup will include solutions from NEC, Samsung and ViewSonic.

The monitor has 100% brightness and 50% contrast by default. I achieved a 100nit white by lowering both to 40% and 29%, respectively. The monitor regulates its brightness by means of backlight modulation at a frequency of 209Hz.

Color gradients are reproduced normally at the default settings but become striped at low values of contrast.

The color gamut is perfectly standard: coinciding with sRGB in blues, smaller in reds and somewhat larger in greens.

The average nonuniformity of white brightness is 6.6% with a maximum deflection of 20.0%. For black brightness the numbers are 6.5% and 20.4%, respectively. These numbers are not quite good. As the pictures indicate, the monitor has a bright center and darker sides.

There is too much contrast at the default settings which is indicated by the characteristic bend of the curves in the top right of the screen. It means the monitor will not differentiate between some of light halftones. I must confess it’s a common problem with NEC’s monitors.

The bend in the curves disappears as soon as you lower the contrast setting by at least 5 steps in the monitor’s menu. This provokes another problem, though. The value of gamma is now too high, and the curves go lower than the theoretical one, resulting in a darker image on the screen.

The color temperature setup is better than with the previous model. White differs from gray considerably, but this is due to the exceedingly high level of contrast I mentioned above (I perform the color temperature measurements at the monitor’s default settings). There are no warm modes again, however. The sRGB mode yields a color temperature of almost 8000K instead of 6500K as described in the sRGB standard. Many users are going to be satisfied with the Native mode and its color temperature of somewhat higher than 7000K, but if you prefer warmer colors, you’ll have to set the monitor up manually.

The maximum brightness is perfectly normal for a modern monitor but the contrast ratio is low. The LCD225WNX is comparable to the LCD22WV in this respect.

The response time average is 14.3 milliseconds (GtG) with a maximum of 32 milliseconds. This is somewhat worse than average in comparison with other RTC-less matrixes. Although the response time of 5 milliseconds specified for such models looks good, you should keep it in mind that this number is due to the specific measurement method. In fact, 5ms TN matrixes are many times slower than 4ms and 2ms matrixes.

So, there is nothing exceptional about this monitor (and about most of other 22-inchers, by the way), yet it does its job well enough. The MultiSync LCD225WNX can do as a monitor for both home and office. Unfortunately, it is rather expensive, like many products from NEC. It costs almost as much money as entry-level 24-inchers. I guess you may want to have a really fast matrix and neater color reproduction setup for such money.